As used herein, a “portion smaller than a partially-filled aperture” means a portion of a molecule that is sufficiently small enough to at least partially extend into, if not completely through, an aperture that is at least partially coated as described herein. As used herein, a “portion larger than a partially-filled aperture” means a portion of a molecule that is sufficiently large enough not to at least partially extend into, an aperture that is at least partially coated as described herein.
This application incorporates by reference U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/377,170 filed May 1, 2002, entitled “Method for Uniform Electrochemical Reduction of Apertures to Micron and Submicron Dimensions Using Commercial Biperiodic Metallic Mesh Arrays and Devices Derived Therefrom”.
Many techniques exist currently for filtering infrared, visible and ultraviolet radiation. Among these are: mono-chromators (grating or prism types), resonators (for example, Fabry-Perot type), multi-layer dielectric thin films on appropriate substrates, films or bulk materials having appropriate dielectric functions, absorbing colored filters, scatter filters, etc. In practice, all of these techniques are adversely affected, to varying degrees, by environmental factors such as heat, humidity, vibrations, etc.
It is therefore a goal of the present invention to construct metallic meshes with ordered arrays of micro-channels and nano-channels, to characterize their unusual optical and electrical properties, and to exploit their unusual properties in order to detect minute quantities of molecules within the micro- and nano-channels.
Practically speaking, it is a goal of the present invention to construct rugged metallic membranes with ordered arrays of micro- and nano-channels from a variety of metals including some (for example gold and silver) with a known potential for surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy and others (such as copper and platinum) with interesting catalytic properties. It is a further goal of the present invention to produce uniform ordered arrays through the membrane over a region of several square millimeters and with aperture widths from 2 to 6000 nanometers. Additionally, the present invention seeks to use electrical and optical detection techniques to know when and how quickly molecules (including bio-molecules) have moved in and out of the nano-channels. Finally, it is a further goal of the present invention to couple the detection methods to analytical techniques for exploring the potential of such techniques on the nano-scale.
The present invention may be utilized in the following applications: in physical separation and filtering, as in inkjet filters; to limit diffusion which may be important in drug delivery or sensor applications; for regulation and switching of ionic flow and molecular transport; as masks for quantum dot arrays; as a matrix for sensor arrays or lipid bi-layer arrays for bio-analysis; as detection elements in chemical separations and assays, such as “nano-capillary” electrophoresis; in solar selective absorbing surfaces, beam splitters, and optical bandpass filters; and in combinatorial work exploiting the arrays, i.e. put something in each channel. Of course, this list is by no means exhaustive of the potential applications in which the present invention may be employed. Rather, it is meant to be illustrative of the breadth of applications in which the present invention may be used.